Tag Archives: google news

We’re all locals in some part of the world, and in these parts, the nature of our news consumption changes. Is ‘local’ news a practice where journalists have become too remote from their audiences? That is the argument of Ross Hawkes in his contribution to The Guardian’s ‘Local newspapers’ crisis’ in discussing what “hyperlocal” means, and why it works.

“For all the technological breakthroughs and tools now available, no-one has yet replaced the ability of a journalist to get their nose stuck in and dig out a story.”

This, in Hawkes view, is the essence of “hyperlocal” journalism and the focused, interactive nature of such news in connecting with audiences and giving them what they actually care about and are affected by. Ultimately, he comes up with a theory of an “almost two-tier journalism” where mainstream media learns from local media to create partnerships – sounding pretty familiar, convergence comes to mind yet again (as it always does when journalism is concerned). The theory links to the idea that everything is converging, not only online and print media but audience and journalist, now even traditional and hyperlocal media.

To move away from the theoretical stance, a comment on the article put it into practical perspective: “I work for a Community Radio Station that launched 6 years ago. By rights we should have had no chance against both an established local radio & newspaper in our market. But the local radio decided to focus on the ‘region’ rather than the specific town it was based in & the newspaper centralised its offices & editorial team. Both broke the direct link between themselves & the audience – while we stuck with our ‘hyper local’ editorial strategy.”

Though Jones was not the one to continue Saddleworth News to this day, his conclusion was that its purpose and online content reached audiences like other local news didn’t – for example, for an election story, he interviewed each candidate in full and linked readers to the interview audio files, while the local newspaper published only short prepared statements from the candidates. Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog is quoted in a Culture, Media and Sport select committee report titled ‘Future for local and regional media’ addressing “hyperlocal” agendas like Jones’s, saying For the hyper-local publishers, bloggers, one key element of quality is transparency. If you report on a council meeting, then you link to the full minutes, you put all of that in its full form.”

But is full form the best form? The committee report also takes into account journalism in snippet form, namely the previews published on Google that redirect readers to original sources. In the report’s section about Google News it lists criticisms from journalists and organisations such as the Guardian Media Group complaining that Google profits from the journalism on its site and is a threat to local news – but, where would journalism be without Google? The Managing director of Google UK Matt Brittin puts it nicely: Google is a “virtual newsagent”, it doesn’t charge news providers anything, plus they give the opportunity for ads, and Google News itself doesn’t carry any ads. The concern of bypassing subscription systems is understandable, but for example, in my experience, the Financial Times has a good enough system that even though I’m stubborn enough to try and access articles from various outlets like Google, I can never get to the content without subscribing. So it’s probably not solely Google’s problem, or ‘wrongdoing’. Search engine optimisation and the use of Google is increasingly quoted as a boost for journalism, so why not local and hyperlocal news?

With all the issues that face local and hyperlocal news, the gist of it is that its closeness to the audience and the richness of information that people living in its range will appreciate is great, but isn’t very economically viable. To sum up, using Richard Jones and his time with the Saddleworth News, hyperlocal news does work – but it doesn’t pay. So will it survive?